Benazir Bhutto

News of Bhutto's assassination reached us today in cold and rainy Providence, Rhode Island. Along with any number of analysts, we can't say we were surprised, yet shock and dismay still register highly. For now, we turn to the quick-moving Tariq Ali, who brings us this report in the Guardian.

As Tariq remarks, Bhutto's behavior both in and out of power are cause for sustained criticism, but this remains a deeply troublesome turn of events.

Holiday Round-up

Above: one of Beatty's finest moments.

Isn't this part of year just the fucking worst?

Perry Anderson has contributed to the November/December issue of New Left Review, offering "jottings" on the myriad "deep structural changes in the world economy and in international affairs" that we've seen and lived through since September, 2001. Anderson, with a scope that is all-encompassing, humbly offers his article as mere conjecture, unsystematic analysis that begs further investigation; yet, this is as good a place as any to start poring over our recent and collective nightmares.

Finally, after Ismail Haniya's comments last week in which he expressed willingness to negotiate a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the NYT reports that Ehud Olmert has refused to enter into any such negotiations. Taking center-stage in the article, however, is the recent Israeli move to submit a budget approval for almost 750 apartments in the illegal settlements of Har Homa and Maale Adumin. Even darling Condi, it seems, isn't so into this recent development, coming as it does just days before the second meeting between Israeli and Palestinian officials since the Annapolis conference...

Holiday Post from No Empires

After a week of domestic and transatlantic travel, birthdays, library visits, and illness, No Ehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifmpires is back with an interview with Terry Eagleton (thanks to our good friend John), right in time for the holiday season. Here, Eagleton discusses the role of religion, his feud with his ever-repugnant colleague Martin Amis, and "leftist arrogance."

No Empires and New York Magazine

Fitting for the soft-liberal and thoroughly contradictory, uncritical politics of New York's youngish chattering inhabitants (who, tellingly, only seem to read the magazine's restaurant section, anyway), New York Magazine has printed a one-page hatchet job concerning NE hero Norman Finkelstein, who is currently trying to rebuild his career following a recent character assassination campaign (led, of course, by Alan Fucking Dershowitz), which cost him his job at Chicago's DePaul University. Ben Harris's 'article' about Finkelstein (which artfully manages to evade ANY FUCKING ENGAGEMENT WHATSOEVER with Finkelstein's work), is entitled 'Beached' (referring to Finkelstein's recent move to his deceased father's apartment in Coney Island), and sub-titled 'The Coney Island exile of a scholar who would be Noam Chomsky, but isn't.' Your guess is as good as ours as to what the fuck this phrase means. But let's move beyond pithy linguistic arguments; there's (barely) enough here that warrants a more polemic response.

Harris, at best a thoroughly shitty writer, does nothing to mask his contempt of what he blatantly considers to be the pathetic nature of Finkelstein's (personal, political, academic) life at present:

His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Notes of support from his students sit on a piano; there’s a photo of him and Noam Chomsky (“my closest friend”) bare-chested on the beach at Cape Cod.

Apparently, for Harris, Finkelstein's students are woefully misguided, yet serve the purpose of consoling Finkelstein following the Dershowitz-orchestrated come-uppance he so obviously deserved. And Noam Chomsky? Harris takes Finkelstein for a deluded fool--if you two are so close, where's your buddy Noam now?

We're surprised we've taken up this much space dealing with Harris's diarrheal diatribe. Read it, or don't. Judging by his own journalistic standards, dealing with primary sources is probably not too high on Harris's to-do list.

Ben Harris: fuck you.

Well-Made World 28

A mishmash for today's update.

First, we turn to yesterday's referendum in Venezuela, which ended in defeat for Hugo Chavez and his plan for advancing Venezuela along the path to a 'socialist' state. Tariq Ali, calling attention to the unprecedentedly low turnout among voters, proposes--while citing analysts of Venezuelan politics--that Chavez's main mistake was to rush the referendum process, which gave the Venezuelan populace little time to take in its implications, while also giving his critics, both in Latin America and Washington, that his rule is an authoritarian one. Ali, ever hopeful, says that this is not, by any stretch, Chavez's downfall.

We turn now to the recent "peace conference" in Annapolis, which Azmi Bishara has termed "Madrid redux"--an analogy all too depressing in its accuracy. Bishara is far too coherent and attentive to detail for us to venture any quick summation of his article, so we must turn you, with no undue urgency, over to him.

And, finally, it is being reported that, in fact, Iran began bowing to international pressure as early as 2003 by ending its project to develop a nuclear arsenal. That, though, is not stopping French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner from sticking to the militaristic line vis-a-vis Iran that he's encouraged since being brought into the fold of Nicolas Sarkozy's government, or from Stephen Hadley saying that pressure must still be kept on Iran to not, er, misbehave. Hypocrisy, while suffering a slight setback, still rules the day!

Has Moz gone the way of Martin Amis?

Stephen Patrick Morrissey--of late, an exile to Rome--has sparked no small furor in the English music press with a recent interview given to the New Musical Express. In the interview, predictably titled 'Bigmouth Strikes Again', Morrissey (who has recently decided to sue the NME) makes some, um, racially insensitive (to put it lightly)comments about immigration policy in the UK. Here is his interviewer, Tim Jonze, weighs in on the fiasco.

Ehud Olmert, the failure of Annapolis, and the One State Solution

Unbelievable interview with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is featured in today's edition of Haaretz. Well, maybe not so unbelievable. Olmert is quoted as saying that as soon as a "South African style" struggle for equal voting rights is realized in Israel/Palestine, whereby the whole of the Palestinian population both inside the Green Line and in the Occupied Territories is recognized along one man/one vote lines, "the state of Israel is finished." Aside from officially establishing the thoroughly racist nature of the Israeli state--no surprise to anyone with half a brain--Olmert makes some other fascinating moves in the interview. He claims that any "peace process" will require "patience and sophistication" on the part of the Israelis (time not healing all wounds, but rather enabling apartheid walls and illegal settlements to become facts on the ground); he also lambastes an already-embarrassing "leader," Mahmoud Abbas, calling him "a weak partner [in the peace talks], and, as Tony Blair says, [one who] has yet to formulate the tools and may not manage to do so." Loyal NE readers, may we be the first to inform you: we are through the looking-glass.

Olmert's interview makes a recent "declaration" in the Electronic Intifada (co-written, among others, by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, and Ali Abunimah) seem all the more poignant, if not utterly impossible in practice. In the piece, its authors make all the historically legitimate arguments as to why the "One-State Solution" is the only honest and fair one available; yet, and especially in the light of Olmert's Haaretz interview, it fails to acknowledge that, at the "official" level of Israeli politics, it is a complete and utter non-starter. Such is the paradox faced by the One-Staties: a thoroughly legitimate premise that is, it seems, impossible to realize.

Ahmad on Pakistan, cont

Thanks to NE BFF J. Loose for alerting us to Aijaz Ahmad's latest interview with the Real News, in which he once again sheds light on the current political situation in Pakistan; here, Ahmed discusses the US government's dependence on the Pakistani military, a relationship that the US will maintain even, if necessary, at the expense its support of general Musharraf.

Fear and Loathing in Anne Arundel County

Today is the day (or at least the paltry reenactment) we've all been waiting for since September 1993 in the Rose Garden at the White House. The Annapolis "conference"--complete with its own PowerPoint-style background graphic--has been roundly ridiculed in recent weeks, with Olmert and Bush firmly rejecting any discussion of final status issues such as the status of Jerusalem or the right of return of Palestinian refugees (which would thereby invalidate the racist Zionist project), and Mahmoud Abbas seemingly more willing than ever to kowtow to American and Israeli diktats. We first here provide you with a powerful report from Gaza, courtesy of Laila El-Haddad and the Electronic Intifada.

"If it were easy [achieving the goal of establishing peace between Israel and Palestine], it would have happened a long time ago" said George Bush...and we'll leave it to our faithful readers to fill in the flagrant historical and ideological gaps in this statement.

For now, an article by NE favorites Kathleen and Bill Christison will do more than suffice.

The Democrats and "The politics of Iraq"

Today's New York Times dutifully reports that the Democratic candidates for President, given recent "security improvements" in Iraq, have decided to move beyond Iraq as a political talking point. Acknowledging (and not, it appears, questioning) the "successes" generated by the Bush administration's troop surge, the Democrats have decided to focus on domestic matters that weigh heavily on the American electorate.

This article indeed provides a sense of Democratic (cop-out) sentiment these days, moving from Hillary Clinton's praise of US troops and their ability to accomplish any task put in front of them, no matter how nefarious, misguided, or illegal; to Barack Obama, who simultaneously harps on about the price of oil and speaks of an invasion of Iran; to the Democrats' recent move to enlist Ricardo Sanchez in their efforts to continue blaming Iraqi politicians for the results of the war.

News From Nowhere

Haaretz reports, to no one's surprise, that 'Israel and the PA have failed to reach a joint statement' prior to this coming week's conference in Annapolis, which likely will quickly join Madrid and Oslo in the group of cities that have hosted woefully misguided 'peace conferences' between Israel and the Palestinians, sponsored by the 'honest broker' that the US purports to be.

This among reports that envoys from Saudi Arabia will be present in Annapolis; this promise referred to a perceived 'Arab consensus' to support the talks, despite the fact that the Arab states have continually failed to rally behind the Palestinians for 40 years. Good news, though: Condoleezza Rice has been charged with the task of producing the summit's final statement, should the Israel and the Pa be unable to reach some sort of consensus. Thus spoke Ismail Haniyeh today:

"We realize that this conference was stillborn and is not going to achieve for the Palestinian people any of its goals or any of the political and legal rights due to them."

Unfortunately, we assume he'll be proven right.

Thanksgiving

Computer problems! Stay tuned for a extra-long post tomorrow.

Annapolis Notes 1

In the lead article for yesterday's issue of Counterpunch, Oren Ben-Dor provides some important context for the upcoming Annapolis conference: as we mentioned in a recent NE post, Olmert has stressed that a "core issue" for the talks will be Palestine's recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state." As many critics have pointed out, Palestinian leaders have already recognized Israel as a state, and as Ben-Dor shows, this new wording has important implications. Also addressing this question is Uri Avnery in another article for the same publication. Avnery describes the conference as a "pipedream...without any preceding strategic planning, any careful preparations, anything much at all." Among other things, Avnery reminds us of the Knesset's very recent adoption of a bill that restricts any change of the borders of Greater Jerusalem without a 2/3 majority, in effect banning Olmert from giving up any Palestinian villages annexed to Jerusalem in 1967.

Bill Keller and Co. continue to sell an unpopular war, but with some heart; plus Eagleton and Amis Revisited

Today's lead article in the New York Times is not, we must stress, a whitewash. It does, of course, give Iraq War apologists something to point to and say: "See, we told you it would take time, but we've really been doing the right thing all along." But as Voices in the Wilderness's Jeff Guntzel points out in two different places, such stories, while desperately important, usually end up telling only half of the story.

In a crucial piece for the Guardian, Ronan Bennett has added to the scarce debate surrounding the row between University of Manchester's own Terry Eagleton and its recent appointment, Martin Amis. In it, he takes to task those in the British media who have trivialized the indirect exchange between Eagleton and Amis, presenting it as merely a "spat" between two well-known figures with incommensurable politics, rather than as a troublesome reflection of issues surrounding race, immigration, religion, and terrorism in the UK. Bennett laments the fact that Amis seems to have gotten off the hook regarding his thoroughly racist remarks and subsequently inadequate and deeply suspect attempts at explaining himself. We're still with Terry on this one, and Bennett does us the service of explaining exactly why we ought to be.

Lebanon "at the brink of an abyss"

With all that's going on in Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela, we haven't been posting much about Lebanon, but this article by Karim Makdisi is a welcome and insightful look at the current crisis in Lebanese politics. Makdisi spends a lot of time discussing the core of the dispute surrounding the upcoming presidential election, detailing the positions of both the pro-US March 14 Coalition (who call for an immediate disarming of Hizbullah and avoidance in Lebanon of larger regional problems) and the opposition (who consider their March 14 opponents proponents of Israel/the US), but he also explains the potential problems that may result in the next two years, even if a consensus is reached.

Siniora must step down on the November 23, so we'll try to keep NE readers posted on what is going on in the next two days.

Annapolis 2007

In light of the upcoming Annapolis conference, NE presents you with the latest by Khaled Amayreh from this week's Al-Ahram. The piece outlines where Israeli and Palestinian politicians stand on issues related to the American roadmap for peace in the middle east, which both sides have agreed will form the basis for the Annapolis discussions, pointing out once again the divergence in Israeli and Palestinian opinion as to what the roadmap actually means (not to mention whether Bush's audacious pledge more than two years ago that Israel could retain major settlements in the West Bank counts as part of the plan). Amayreh also considers Israel's racist demand that Palestine recognize Israel as a Jewish state (the pre-condition, Olmert claims, to Israel's involvement in any negotiations, let alone its recognition of Palestine), outlining what such a concession would mean for Palestinian citizens in Israel as well as the Palestinian right of return.

All of this, of course, sounds eerily familiar, and if you haven't read it yet, NE recommends you take a look at the late Tanya Reinhardt's Israel/Palestine: How to end the War of 1948 (2002, Seven Stories Press) and The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (2003, Verso Books).

Also from Al-Ahram: it would appear that Israeli rhetoric toward Egypt has outflanked even that of the US regarding Iran. Journalist Saleh al-Naami writes that " The Israeli security establishment appears determined to deal with Egypt as if the two countries were at war," most recently appealing to the US Senators for passing of a resolution that would freeze $200 million dollars of American aid to Egypt, the purported motivation behind which is punishment for Egypt's "failure" to curtail the smuggling of arms into Gaza. Even Israel, possessing a large and undeclared nuclear arsenal, is putting pressure on the "international community" to shut down Egypt's publicly-known nuclear energy program.

"An extraordinary experiment...in centralized, oil-fueled socialism"

Hugo Chavez's rule in Venezuela has taken new (if not unexpected) turns in recent weeks. What's happening in Venezuela is undeniably interesting, but we at NE are trying to temper our excitement with an awareness that Chavez, while making great strides towards a socialist ideal, is at the same time consolidating a cult of personality around himself and his office--an almost Stalinist fetishization of power/presidential office (though we'd like to assume that Chavez has no sympathy for Stalinism). The effects of the move Chavez has made are thoroughly unpredictable; his opposition calls it a textbook coup d'etat, but even the New York Times has deemed it an extraordinary socialist experiment. We should consider a nation-wide group of players in judging Chavez's latest move to consolidate the functions of the Venezuelan government, from the army (composed of both Chavistas and pro-Western loyalists) to Venezuelan farmers, who have have lost the impetus to mass-produce crops due to Chavez's initiative to drive down the price of food to accommodate the Venezuelan poor. What is happening in Venezuela is undoubtedly among the most interesting and exciting of political developments in recent years, and things seem to be moving quite rapidly--even some of those who called themselves Chavistas as recently as one week ago have changed camps--so we'll be sure to keep you posted.

We refer you to this piece by Federico Fuentes, which highlights the threats still looming for Chavez from the Venezuelan right, as well as an article from Gabriel Hetland, which draws attention to the contradictions which have been inherent in Chavez's Bolivarian revolution from the outset.

Among Venezuela, Pakistan, and Iran, we've got our fucking hands full.

Well-Made World 27

Graham Usher's latest article in Al-Ahram is a helpful assessment of Benazir Bhutto's decision to refuse the possibility of talks between her and Musharraf. Also in this week's issue of Al-Ahram is a piece by Azmi Bishara which includes some commentary on Musharraf (as well as on the death of Enola Gay pilot General Paul Tibbets, America as a nuclear power, and Lebanon).

Aijaz Ahmed and The Real News

If you haven't taken a moment to check out the ever-insightful Aijaz Ahmed on The Real News, now might be a good time. He has two new interviews up today, one on the new IAEA report and another on General Musharraf 's political future, so make sure to have a look.

Well-Made World 26

Here's another article from Frank Rich from a few days ago and stillworth the read. Rich compares the recent controversy (or lack thereof) surrounding Michael B. Mukasey's nomination for attorney generalto the current situation in Pakistan; particularly interesting to NEreaders in the face of upcoming presidential nominations, however, isone of Chuck Schumer's main arguments regarding his role in ensuringMukasey's nomination: simply that hes not as frightful as Gonzalez orthe acting attorney general who might otherwise be in line for theposition. Rich points out that in this statement and elsewhere,democrats like Schumer "sounded whipped." The democrats' impotency,of course, is old news, but more importantly, such comments remind usthat the democrats' pathetic "anybody but Bush" strategy from the lastpresidential election still quite miraculously figures in theircurrent strategy.

Also, may we direct you to an ongoing series from Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair on the history/candidacy of Hillary Clinton, in (thus far) parts one and two (of three).

Works Consulted #7

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York,1980)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983)
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (London, 1968)
Neil Lazarus, 'Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born' ('Research in African Literature' 18, 1982); "Great Expectations and after: The Politics of Postcolonialism in African Fiction" (Social Text, 1982)
Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine (New York, 1972)
Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with a few Other Poems (Bristol, 1798)
Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London 1994)
M. Keith Booker, Ulysses, Colonialism, and Capitalism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War (Connecticut, 2001)
Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, 2000)
Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971-1986; Volume 1: Situations of Theory, foreword by Neil Larsen (London, 1988), Postmodernism; or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, 1991)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans.; (France, 1961); L'An Cinq de la revolution algerienne/A Dying Colonialism (New York, 1970)
Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987)
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961)
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London, 1949)

Well-Made World 25

We're generally of two minds about Frank Rich, but his NYT opinion piece this past Sunday, whose title borrows from Joe Biden's pitch-perfect one-liner on Rudy Giuliani, is a worthwhile read. Rich muses on the idea that, for all of its swaggering and bluster, if the Bush administration does not wage an attack inside Iran, it could spell curtains for any Democratic hope of winning the White House next year.

Speaking of Giuliani, here's what he had to say recently about an old pal (guess who!):
"Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape."
Meanwhile, that old pal's legal troubles just won't go away...

The Guardian's US correspondent, the wonderful Gary Younge, spoke recently with Angela Davis, who comments eloquently on, among other things: the current state of race relations in the United States; the incorporation of her iconic image into American popular culture (akin to the t-shirtization of Che Guevara); the regressive nature of the political appointments given to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; and the candidacy of Barack Obama, who, she says, represents "a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change."

Well-Made World 24

In a letter to the president of the Oxford Union, Israeli filmmaker Ronen Berelovich laments Oxford's decision to uninvite Norman Finkelstein from a panel discussion on the one-state solution in Israel/Palestine. This is a shameful display of academic intolerance that is more suited to the United States, where Finkelstein has already experienced enough undue ideological censure; accordingly, the three other academics who were slated to represent Finkelstein's side of the debate (the one-state, as opposed to two-state, side)--Ghada Karmi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe--have withdrawn from the debate. Karmi's recent article for Comment is Free details the circumstances surrounding their withdrawal, as well as what she sees as the importation of the notorious Israel lobby of American onto British soil.

And thanks to John for bringing this article from The Nation to our attention: an account of the political climate regarding Israel/Palestine at Columbia University that almost has us at No Empires wishing we were back home...

Well-Made World 23

Today, one-half of No Empires attended a lecture by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities in London. We normally reserve little sympathy for Zizek's popular obtuseness--not to mention his deplorable rock star-cum-intellectual demeanor--but he remains a powerful and intellectually responsible force of the Left. We bring to you Zizek's piece from today's Guardian, which gives, in crystallized form, the basis of today's lecture. Zizek in person, incidentally, is sloppy as fuck, and given to any number of distracting nervous tics.

Tariq Ali weighs in on the bloodshed that awaited Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan, pointing out not only the vanity that characterized her 'show of strength' in the streets of Karachi, but also the outstanding charges of corruption against her which may yet find her serving time behind bars, to the hypocritical pleasure of the Musharraf government and its demand for "justice."

In an incredible interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, the recent Nobel-prize recipient Doris Lessing called out Americans for failing to view 9-11 in the context of the "terrible" actions of the IRA in England. After making this somewhat far-fetched comparison (and without making allowances for the differences between sustained colonial resistance that, as this article from the Guardian points out, resulted in the deaths of more than 3,700 people over thirty years, as opposed to terrorist acts that killed almost 3,000 people in one day), Lessing went on to praise Lee Bollinger's treatment of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling it "marvelous!" Uh, well done, Doris.

Well-Made World 22

Quote of the day--

"I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me, because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell."
--Former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto on the prospect of violence directed toward her upon her return to Pakistan following eight years of exile. And yet, this, from the AP, about fifteen minutes ago.

We're doing our best to keep on top of developments in Pakistan--an as-of-yet official presidential election; Bhutto's return; continuing anti-Nato violence across Waziristan. For the moment, we respectfully defer to Aijaz Ahmad, and this two-part video interview from the Real News website, one of our favorite sites recently, where Aijaz is a senior news analyst.

Also, congratulations to new grandfather and fellow-traveler of No Empires, John Loose (see above!), as well as to Manya and Mark.

Works Consulted #6

• Harriot Jacobs, Incidents in the Live of a Slave Girl (1859; found in in The Classic Slave Narratives, Signet 1987)
• Henry James, In The Cage (1898), in Selected Tales, (ed. John Lyon, Penguin 2001)
• Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (speech at Yale, 1989)
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), in The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (ed. T.J. Lustig, Oxford 1992)
• Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time" (1979)
• Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell 1990)
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794; Penguin 1988)
• Ghada Karmi, talk at Bookmarks store in London; Married To Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Books 2007)
• William Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799; Penguin 1988)
• Gyorgy Lukacs, The Historical Novel (1937; Merlin 1962)
• Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Verso 1990)
• Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Univ. of California Press, 1982)
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Belknap 2005)
• Elizabeth Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford 2004)

Legitimizing land grabs

Apparently, after two recent meetings with PM Ehud Olmert, Abu Mazen has perfected the duplicitious and prevaricating language of Israeli diplomacy. In what would initially seem the toughest language to come out of "official" Palestine since this summer's coup, Abbas claims to be after no less than all territory illegally annexed by Israel in June 1967, some 2,400 square miles, or 22% of historic Palestine. He notes, however (and this is where it gets tricky), that "[to] a border adjustment, on the basis of the same quality and the same amount, we have no objections." In other words, word from Ramallah to the rest of Occupied Palestine: let's be ready for a land swap! Abbas did not deem it fit to speak of the Separation Wall, the right of return, or any other final-status issue.

This comes on a day of wide reporting of Israel's intent to annex four Palestinian villages in the West Bank, for the purpose of expanding Israeli settlements. Israeli army says that the illegal confiscation will result in a "Palestinians-only" road from East Jerusalem to Jericho. Lovely. A road that will be largely unusable/inaccessible to the majority of Palestinians near it, all to connect the discontinuous Palestinian cantons found in the 23 miles from Jerusalem to Jericho.

'Pillars of society, pimping for torture'--Perry Anderson on the European Union

In a recent piece for the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson refutes the somewhat pathetic but surprisingly common (at least for Western neo-liberals, that is) notion that Europe will prove itself to be the world’s exemplar of freedom and stability for the twenty-first century (or, as it is alternately known in the minds of its champions, the "New European Century," a terminology frightening in its resemblance to its now-defunct American counterpart). Citing an unprecedented degree of 'political vanity' across the EU, Anderson seeks to clarify what ten years ago were 'three great imponderables': a single European currency, intended to bolster investment and productivity across (Western) Europe; Germany's reemergence, following reunification, as one of the two most powerful countries in Europe; and eastward expansion of the EU. The results, according to Anderson, are at best decidedly mixed, and certainly do not merit the talk of a European 'renaissance' that has been much publicized.

Tracking Europe's evolution over the last two decades, Anderson separates European myth--a Union of 'peace, prosperity, and democracy' (in the words of Mark Leonard)--from European reality--plain old free-market liberalism and privitisation of everything under the sun. The myth, which rests on a vague, always negative conception of Europe as “not America,” is betrayed, Anderson shows, by the EU’s betrayal of social democratic principles (not to mention Eastern Europe), as well as the Union’s increasingly slavish relationship to the US and its imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan--and possibly, in the coming months, Iran. Furthermore, the EU has yet to strike out a path independent of the United States regarding their mutual client state, Israel, and its ongoing illegal occupation of historic Palestine. Anderson points in particular to how the Union's expansion eastward has been predicated on an unwillingness to grant Eastern European countries any sort of autonomy from the British/French/German triumvirate--this Eastern inclusion, furthermore, must go through a vetting process headed up by the UN and the United States, who are in charge of deeming several countries either fit (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic) or unfit (Turkey, thus far) for entry into the EU.

Anderson calls this an "asymmetrical symbiosis" between the EU and the US, which is ultimately in contradiction to any anticipated European hegemony in the 21st century. We don't wish to overburden our readers with a step-by-step analysis of Anderson's argument; we can only encourage you to take the time to read his supremely important article.

Terry Eagleton v. Martin Amis/Barack Obama is a fabricator and you must not vote for him.

Martin Amis has been given a position at the University of Manchester, teaching Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, whose influence Amis has boringly worn on his sleeve for two decades. Manchester also happens to be Terry Eagleton's employer. To add to this, Eagleton has taken the opportunity, in a new Preface to his classic Ideology: An Introduction (reprinted by Verso this year) to take Martin Amis to task for his unabashedly reactionary turn following September 11, as well as to point out that Amis the Younger seems to be inheriting the most xenophobic and idiotic traits that his father, Kingsley, ever exhibited.

We are of the mind that both Amises have written, between them, at least two good novels (chronologically, Lucky Jim and London Fields). Yet Amis the Younger's war-mongering turn in recent years is thoroughly inexcusable, not to mention patently racist. In a quote that could have been come straight from the mouth of Christopher Hitchens (who has also, as we're sure you're aware, gone off the deep end in the past decade), novelist Martin Amis offered this answer to a question about whether his creative writing courses would have a particular theme: "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, "Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd." Yet Amis is fooling no one. An apt slogan for the corruption of critical thinking, this quotation could be the motto of a particularly unpalatable contrarian attitude by which the likes of Amis and Hitchens justify their newfound reactionary sensibilities in the wake of 9-11. If Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis do end up in a hallway scuffle at the University of Manchester, we at No Empires know which of the two we'll be rooting for.

Echoing the first-ever No Empires post, No Empires still hates Barack Obama. We'll leave you with an excerpt from an article by Paul Street on America's most accessible black man; yet also its most dangerous, as he seems willing to ignore the entire miserable history of white supremacism and the black experience in America:

In Selma, Alabama last March, Obama claimed that the Civil Rights Movement's heroic struggles in Selma (site of a famous 1965 voting rights march) and Birmingham (home to an epic 1963 desegregation battle) sent out ripples of socially progressive change that permitted his black father (Barack Obama, Sr.) and white mother to "get together" and conceive "Barack Obama Jr." Behold the following incredible passage from Obama's speech at the fabled black church Brown Chapel in Selma:

"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "Ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children. When men who had PhD's decided that's enough and we're going to stand up for our dignity."

"That sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance."

"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals set forth in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is."

"This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me."

Too bad Obama was born four years before the Selma struggle in the relatively multicultural island state of Hawaii, where there was nothing all that shocking about a white woman marrying a graduate student from Kenya!

I cannot explain the line about "men who had Ph.D's.

Follow up to Ahmedinejad at Columbia

For the millionth time, thanks and love to Loose. This is from the Fars news agency in Iran:

Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions

The following is the full text of the letter.

Mr. Lee Bollinger
Columbia University President

We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran , hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent speech at Columbia University.

We would like to inform you that President Ahmadinejad was elected directly by the Iranian people through an enthusiastic two-round poll in which almost all of the country's political parties and groups participated. To assess the quality and nature of these elections you may refer to US news reports on the poll dated June 2005.

Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.

Your comments, filled with hate and disgust, may well have been influenced by extreme pressure from the media, but it is regrettable that media policy-makers can determine the stance a university president adopts in his speech.

Your remarks about our country included unsubstantiated accusations that were the product of guesswork as well as media propaganda. Some of your claims result from misunderstandings that can be clarified through dialogue and further research.

During his speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad answered a number of your questions and those of students. We are prepared to answer any remaining questions in a scientific, open and direct debate.

You asked the president approximately ten questions. Allow us to ask you ten of our own questions in the hope that your response will help clear the atmosphere of misunderstanding and distrust between our two countries and reveal the truth.

1- Why did the US media put you under so much pressure to prevent Mr. Ahmadinejad from delivering his speech at Columbia University? And why have American TV networks been broadcasting hours of news reports insulting our president while refusing to allow him the opportunity to respond? Is this not against the principle of freedom of speech?

2- Why, in 1953, did the US administration overthrow the Iran's national government under Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh and go on to support the Shah's dictatorship?

3- Why did the US support the blood-thirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran, considering his reckless use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers defending their land and even against his own people?

4- Why is the US putting pressure on the government elected by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza instead of officially recognizing it? And why does it oppose Iran 's proposal to resolve the 60-year-old Palestinian issue through a general referendum?

5- Why has the US military failed to find Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden even with all its advanced equipment? How do you justify the old friendship between the Bush and Bin Laden families and their cooperation on oil deals? How can you justify the Bush administration's efforts to disrupt investigations concerning the September 11 attacks?

6- Why does the US administration support the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) despite the fact that the group has officially and openly accepted the responsibility for numerous deadly bombings and massacres in Iran and Iraq? Why does the US refuse to allow Iran 's current government to act against the MKO's main base in Iraq?

7- Was the US invasion of Iraq based on international consensus and did international institutions support it? What was the real purpose behind the invasion which has claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Where are the weapons of mass destruction that the US claimed were being stockpiled in Iraq?

8- Why do America's closest allies in the Middle East come from extremely undemocratic governments with absolutist monarchical regimes?

9- Why did the US oppose the plan for a Middle East free of unconventional weapons in the recent session of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors despite the fact the move won the support of all members other than Israel?

10- Why is the US displeased with Iran's agreement with the IAEA and why does it openly oppose any progress in talks between Iran and the agency to resolve the nuclear issue under international law?

Finally, we would like to express our readiness to invite you and other scientific delegations to our country. A trip to Iran would allow you and your colleagues to speak directly with Iranians from all walks of life including intellectuals and university scholars. You could then assess the realities of Iranian society without media censorship before making judgments about the Iranian nation and government.

You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests.

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at Columbia

Much has already been made of Ahmedinejad's visit to Columbia, which passed yesterday. After cancelling his invitation by Lisa Anderson last year, it's been obvious that Lee Fucking Bollinger couldn't have kept his well-worn, if inconsistent--we're reminded of the row over Jim Gilchrist and his proto-fascist "Minutemen" last year--First Amendment cred by bailing on Ahmedinejad two years in a row. Sure enough, L.F.B. was quick to pat himself on the back for going out on such a limb in upholding Ahmedinejad's right to speak--though he also, of course, found time to mouth the Bush administration's line about Ahmedinejad being the leader of a "state sponsor of terror," how Iran's helping fight a "proxy war" against the US in Iraq, blah blah blah. For his performance, Bollinger even managed to win the approval of AIPAC.

We'd like to direct your attention to the Washington Post's Global Power Barometer, which summed up national and global reaction to Bollinger's "introduction" and Ahmedinejad's speech this way:

• Conservative and heartland America papers by and large praised the very tough introduction of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and strongly criticized the performance of the Iranian President.
• Analysts with an understanding of the global stage were fairly uniform in their view that while President Bollinger played well to those who criticized his decision to invite President Ahmadinejad in the first place, his introduction played perfectly into the hands of the Iranina President and Iranian hard liners. The take of these analysts was that while a Tim Russert (NBC Meet the Press host) style inquisition could have taken the Iranian President apart, Dr. Bollinger's approach turned him into a sympathetic figure and violated just about every Middle East tradition, thereby enhancing President Ahmadinejad's stature in Iran and the region. Consensus: Thanks to Bollinger, Ahmadinejad won on the global stage.
• GPB take: While the GPB understands the pressure President Bollinger was under, his response was symptomatic of the ignorance even educated Americans have about playing to the myriad of cultures spanning the Middle East and the world. To date that extraordinary cultural ignorance has cost the US thousands of US lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars and the presitge of the US throughout the world. It is the primary reason the US is at the bottom of the GPB scale in terms of its ability to move the global agenda. Hopefully, at some time in the future, American politicians (and university presidents) will learn that being truly tough and winning on the global stage requires the discipline to realize you need to move those who are your adversaries not those who compose your base. The Iranians learned that a very long time ago, which is why they came out ahead today with the audiences that will determine US success or failure in the Middle East.

Let's be clear--we have very little sympathy for Ahmedinejad's abrasive, one-liner style, which only seems to increase in intensity the more he comes under fire in his own country; and Holocaust denial holds for us about the same water as those who claim, as Benny Morris bizarrely now does (but for many years did not), that Palestinians in 1948 left their homes and land entirely of their own will, or at the urging of neighboring Arab states, rather than under the threat of forced expulsion or death from Haganah forces.

It's enough to say that Iran's president is a provocateur without equal on the world stage, and that his wide popularity in the Arab and so-called "developing" world is a result of his unflinching willingness to decry question America's untrammeled power. That said, we are of the mind, with Juan Cole, that Ahmedinejad is a "bantam cock of a populist", whose real (and only) authority lies in the regional strength that Iran has been flaunting ever since the American misadventure in Iraq went awry, irrespective of what date one wishes to put on the beginning of the present nightmare. Iran is a real political force to be reckoned with in today's Middle-Far East, as much as Hezbollah and Hamas, independent of lazy and unfounded US claims of patronage between the former and the latter two. In fact, the US is directly responsible for this unprecedented shift in the balance of power. Yet Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, are continually deemed unfit as partners in dialogue, let alone as important political actors.

All this being said, a balance sheet deserves being drawn, at least to flesh out our own feelings on Ahmedinejad. Let's ignore the crowds of (partly bussed-in) protesters crowding College Walk and the paths to Butler Library and Lerner Hall; pictures in the New York Times of some of them holding up the painfully predictable "Iran funds Hamas"placards--the same we've seen at "Salute to Israel" parades on Fifth Avenue--is enough to pass their presence off as demagoguery and plain political infantilism.

The rub is, when Ahmedinejad says rightly that "We need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for" the Holocaust--referring to Israel's repeated, often implicit assertions that the crimes of Nazi Germany ought to justify its 40-year old illegal occupation and brutally violent denial of the right of Palestinian self-determination--he still fucks this up by saying that the undeniable fact of the Holocaust ought to be called into question. Looking to make a plainly historical point, Ahmedinejad lapses into asinine ideology.

He finds himself on solid ground once again that Iran cannot formally recognize the state of Israel "because [the Israeli state] is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation and it consistently threatens its neighbors." Again, this helps account for his oft-wavering popularity at home and abroad. Ahmedinejad's on the money as well when he points out the brazen hypocrisy of Europe and America's desire to control or curtail Iran's nuclear programs.

Just as there is no excusing treating the Holocaust as "theory" rather than historical fact, there is no excusing his ludicrous assertion that "[Iran doesn't] have homosexuals like in your country"--though this doesn't at all give free license to gay and lesbian rights activists to join in the war-mongering chorus in Morningside Heights. (An aside: please see Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs, referred to elsewhere on this site, for more on how the "Gay International" ends up universalizing repressive norms of what behavior is and is not "gay" in the name of its own normative ontology.)

No Empires: Summer 2007 Demo

As we've alluded to, we wrote and recorded a few songs this summer, and we'd like to share them with you. The first two tracks below are NE originals, and the third is a cover of a song by late-70s Boston band The Rentals (no, not the shittier-than-shit Weezer breakaway). This third song in particular is recommended if you like songs about, uh, child molestation. Pervert.

Extra-special thanks to TJ DeSola and Colin Hagendorf.

"Hard" copies of this demo, in cassette form, expected to be available Winter-Spring 2008.

1. "Girlfriend Island"


2. "Excavation"


3. "I Got A Crush on You"

Well-Made World 21 (a Transatlantic strike)

Late (or early?) edition UPDATE:

The sky gets darker the longer the Giuliani campaign increases its viability. Why this endlessly greedy, self-aggrandizing, par-for-the-course asshole would want to abandon his uber-cushy private sector job for the paltry paycheck of President is a bit unclear--though it's been obvious for some time that he's ready, finally, to leave old buddy Bernie Kerik (who has been, more recently, and in order: failed candidate for Homeland Security; head American cop in Iraq [for 4 months]; and potential tax-fraud indictee) by the wayside. It seems people, and their convictions/affiliations, really can change. Giuliani, who, as mayor, was a fierce gun control advocate--one rare point of agreement between us and him--is now doing his all to woo the N.R.A., even going so far as to say that 9/11 has put "a whole different emphasis on what America has to do to protect itself.” (Though it's arguable that one of Rudy's spokesmen went even further in his clarification of this remark; see the end of the article.)

Ahmed Yousef, political advisor to (unconstitutionally) sacked Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh, has written an editorial for Ha'aretz in which he puts forth a position which should be plainly obvious, yet given American coverage of the subject, is woefully anything but: that the political stalemate, at the "official" level in Israel/Palestine, as well as final status issues pertaining to the Israeli occupation, can only be solved with an inclusion of Hamas in multilateral dialogue. Yousef points out that the purportedly-total animosity between Hamas and Fatah, deployed to great effect in the Western press by Mahmoud Abbas and fellow coup-makers, is nowhere near as all-encompassing as it would seem. He concludes rightly that, far from being spokesmen for the radical Islamist avant-garde in the Arab world, Hamas is working to curtail extremist trends by offering a widely popular--among occupied Palestinians, if not the Arab world more broadly--and secular platform for peace between Israel and occupied/displaced Palestinians. Something tells us that the sound logic of Yousef's proposition will find scant audience in the circles of Bush, Olmert, and Abbas; in particular with Bush, as it flies in the face of the deeply deluded neocon logic he's done so much to propogate.

Speaking of which delusion...
In his latest piece for commentisfree, William Dalrymple argues (quite even-handedly, NE might add) for a strain of American/British foreign policy less resistant to political Islam, pointing out the neo-conservative response has done nothing but guarantee the rise of what they hysterically call "Islamofascism." Like many commentators before him, Dalrymple contrasts neo-con foreign policy (considered by frightening numbers of people in the countries NE call home a legitimate reaction to the threat of "Islamofascism" and the rise of "jihadism") with what anyone NE can respect would consider a self-fulfilling prophecy. As neo-cons consider the growing numbers of Muslim representatives in democratic governments proof of a problem in need of a solution, NE is reminded of pre-emptive warfare, a neo-con trope that is, apparently, no longer necessary.

Works Consulted #5

• Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (Thoemmes)
• Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Signet Classics)
  
• Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin Classics)
  
• Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own (Harcourt)
• Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (Verso)
• David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso)
• Franco Solinas, State of Siege (script of Costa-Gavras film)
  

Well-Made World 20

View from a room in Chicago, where this past weekend NE neglected to venture to the Empty Bottle to take in a Silver Apples show, yet managed to consume margaritas from a tap, hot fudge out of a microwaveable pouch, and direct sunlight, all at U.S. Cellular Field. There was a Sarah Grand novel somewhere in there, as well, courtesy of Myopic in Chicago. We're only human--and we were celebrating a birthday. Love and thanks to Lauren Leigh for some local knowledge and advice, and for helping us find delicious and cheap burritos. (La Pasadita!)

Now, back to business.

Columbia University has reclaimed (from DePaul University) its rightful place as the epicenter of highly dubious and ideologically-motivated tenure fights. Barnard College has already approved for tenure anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, author of the excellent and rigorous Facts on the Ground, an examination of the use of archeology in Israeli society and politics, and an account--dating back to the Mandate period--of the ways in which Israel, through a mix of archaeology, politics, and violence has tried to nullify any Palestinian claim to the land which now forms the Israeli state. Despite Barnard's approval, Nadia's fate now ultimately lies with Lee Fucking Bollinger, as Columbia has final jurisdiction regarding tenure at Barnard. We apologize for not being the slightest bit optimistic for Nadia, as Bollinger has gone to great lengths recently (most notably through a couple full-page ads in the New York Times) to defend Israel against Britain's Association of University Teachers, who are suggesting a boycott of Israeli academics for their tacit support of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories and the south of Lebanon. As was the case with Norman Finkelstein, Nadia's qualifications for tenure are unquestionable, and her work is vital.

More on Finkelstein: following a settlement with DePaul, he has formally resigned from his teaching post. Link is to an interview with Finkelstein and his attorney, conducted by the venerable Amy Goodman.

Finkelstein update

One would think that Father Dennis Holtschneider and DePaul University could stoop no lower, after they denied Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee tenure on the absolute flimsiest of premises--let's call it The Dershowitz Ultimatum. However, they outdid themselves on Sunday, when they cancelled Finkelstein's classes, and announced that he would be placed on "administrative leave, with pay" for the 2007-8 academic year, which was anyhow to be his last at DePaul. To take it even further, they are keeping him out of his own office and barring him from the political science department. When classes begin September 5, Finkelstein says he will be there, and if he continues to be shut out, he'll resort to alternative measures.

Well-Made World 19

For the NLR, Alex Cockburn has expanded a piece from Le Monde Diplomatique--which we linked to several weeks back--on the state of the American anti-war movement. Cockburn writes on the recent history of anti-war and left groups in America, both popular and marginal, and details the ineptitude of the splintered coalitions opposing the Iraq war, finding much fault with the mainstream anti-war movement's "occasionally petulant subservience" to the Democratic party since 2003.

Also, tacked onto a piece for Counterpunch on Nuri al-Maliki is a reaction to Cockburn's criticism of the anti-war movement from the Institute for Policy Studies' Phyllis Bennis. Bennis takes issue in particular with the notion, proposed by Cockburn in his original piece, that it would behoove the left in the US to humanize Iraq's multifaceted resistance. Bennis complains that because the Iraqi resistance lacks a cohesive and demonstrable central authority (unlike the FMLN, or the African National Congress), it lacks accountability to the population of Iraq (who bear the brunt of the America's aggression, as well as of the resistance) and so does not deserve the support of anti-war sympathizers in America. It's puzzling, if not plain stupid, that Bennis could possibly expect an El Salvadorean-style resistance authority after six years of the Bush administration doing everything in its power to exploit deep-seated ethnic tension in Iraq. Bennis also makes the point that, because some actions taken by the resistance are morally reprehensible, no further attempt at humanizing the resistance are necessary, or even warranted. Cockburn then responds. Read on.

George Bush has recently likened the situation in Iraq, and the consequences of a troop withdrawal, to the fate suffered by millions of Vietnamese following the end of the war there. The New York Times claims that "Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies." Bush mentions the Khmer Rouge and the "killing fields" of Pol Pot, but neglects the fact--pesky historical memory! motherfucker!--that, had Richard Nixon heeded the antiwar movement, the war would've ended in 1969, and the "secret" war in Cambodia, which paved the way for Pol Pot by completely destroying the country, would've never taken place.

Munir Chalabi has written a crucial piece of analysis of the Iraqi oil law, which remains stillborn.

Here's a trio dealing with fallout from the recent Hamas putsch/Fatah coup, and it seems that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad combined may yet outflank post-Oslo Arafat's desperate ineffectivity and enslavement to US-Israeli diktats. Amira Hass, an NE hero and an Israeli woman who has lived in and reported from Gaza for over a decade, gives us the latest from Israel's wet-dream of a "Palestinian state." Amira is characteristically even-handed in reporting the Palestinian political civil war, faulting

Israel, the occupier that shirks its obligation as an occupying power; the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is abandoning its citizens while continuing to try to ostracize the majority movement and make it fail; Hamas, which boasted about "liberating" Gaza and uses Qassam fire and declarations of "resistance" to escape its political and economic failures; the donor states, which use (generous) donations to cover up political powerlessness; and the United States, which is leading the boycott campaign [against Hamas] and supports Israel.

Exiled ex-Israeli MK Azmi Bishara, writing for al-Ahram Weekly, draws historical, political, and moral parallels between apartheid South Africa and the occupied Palestinian territories. This is a concern, of course, pursued in recent decades by Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, Ramzy Baroud, Jennifer Loewenstein, and others. Bishara remains under threat of arrest, were he to return to Israel, due to accusations that he provided tactical support to Hezbollah during last summer's Lebanon war, charges with both Bishara and Hezbollah have stringently denied.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8962.shtml

On inactivity

As "regular" readers (to sound presumptuous) of NE can recognize, we haven't exactly been the most prolific blog-keepers of late. Early on, we set an ultimately untenable precedent of 15-20 postings a month. That we probably would not be able to stick to such a rate of output was in the back of our minds when NE took off--but we remain confident and ambitious.

At the time of writing, NE's contributors are preparing for a transatlantic rupture, half of which has begun, and which culminates in one month, when one can find half of NE in Bloomington, Indiana (one can already), and half in London, UK. While the expected communication lag may make the idea of continuing this project seem daunting, we feel that it can only bring our work to better, and more unexpected, places.

We've begun to feel that the work we've done here so far, while exciting for us and hopefully of some greater services to those who read it, has become somewhat constricted and, dare we say it, even predictable. The "Well-Made World" series, an urgent and challenging part of NE (as well as subtle tribute to B.C. Gilbert), has been predominant here, and while it will continue to be a cornerstone of the project, our perhaps-overweening focus on it has caused the overall "diversity" of what we would like NE to be to suffer. All by way of saying: we're not getting too comfortable (or at all comfortable, really...), and we're going to push this thing a whole lot further in the coming weeks and months.

On a more exuberant note: No Empires has recorded a three-song cassette (two originals and one cover; total running time approx. 4 1/2 to 5 mins.), mixing of which will continue over the next few weeks. A (very) limited edition of this tape will hopefully be available this winter.

Well-Made World 18

Hi again. Thought that, come August, we had gone the way of the US Congress or its Iraqi counterpart? You were wrong. We are back.

Over the past 40 years, Regis Debray has made it from languishing in Bolivian jail--after being one of the last people to see Che Guevara alive--to being one of the most respected and sought-after political analysts in Europe. We've returned with Debray and this piece on Palestine, commissioned last winter by then-outgoing French president Jacques Chirac, and published in the August 2007 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Debray's report reads as somewhat dated--it was handed in to the French government in January, and therefore cannot cover even the most obvious and directly important events that have transpired since then, such as the Hamas putsch in Gaza and the subsequent illegal Fatah coup. What Debray finds is far more damning than a simple gap between intent and action on the part of Israel or the "international community." Rather, what he sees at work is a fundamental break between the lip service paid to the "peace process" or a putative "Palestinian state," and the creation of facts on the ground--Israel's favored "strategy" since the pre-state Yishuv--that are destroying what slight chances remain for even an "imperfect peace."

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele writes that, unfortunately for Dick Cheney and his friends in the US oil lobby, Iraqi legislators did not pass the oil law that Washington has been trying to ram through the Iraqi parliament before it began its much-debated August recess. This could be due to the simple fact that, to the chagrin of Cheney et al, the Iraqi lawmakers have actually decided to carefully read the legislation, which would greatly destabilize Iraqi sovereignty over the country's oil reserves if passed in its present form.

Works Consulted #4

• witold gombrowicz, cosmos (trans. danuta borchardt) (yale, 2005)
• raymond williams, the politics of modernism: against the new conformists (verso, 1989)

Twilights Last Gleaming

More posts to come, but in the meantime, go see Ulzana's Raid at BAM tomorrow night. NE loves Robert Aldrich!

No Empires' Favorite Records of 2007 (so far, and in no particular order)

• Mika Miko - 666 (PPM)
• Judee Sill - Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972-73 (Easy Action)
• Silver Daggers - New High & Ord (Load)
• Throbbing Gristle - Part Two: The Endless Not (Mute)
• Shearing Pinx/Modern Creatures - Split cassette (INW)
• Dead Moon - Echoes of the Past (Sub Pop)
• Meg Baird - Dear Companion (Drag City)
• Acid Reflux - EP 7" (TKO?)
• Tyvek - Summer Burns 2x7" (Whats Your Rupture?)
• The Vicious - Igen 7" (YAN)
• Blues Control - S/T (Holy Mountain)
• Sir Richard Bishop - While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (Locust)
• Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)
  
  

Well-Made World 17

Europe

Loose directs us to a missive from Terry Eagleton, on the Guardian's blog, calling curtains on Britain's centuries-old tradition of subversive/contrarian writers--making an exception for Harold Pinter, who, Eagleton admits, may only be offering a form of "champagne socialism." Unsurprisingly, TE's examples are overwhelmingly male, though he does toss in the obligatory Virginia Woolf/"Three Guineas" reference, and notes the brief flashes of Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. Still, Eagleton's contemporary targets (Larkin, Hare, Rushdie, Amis the Younger, et al.) are worthy ones.

The "War on Terror"

Some of the most "well-behaved" prisoners at Guantanamo, many of whom have been slated for release for upwards of a year, have recently been awarded new freedoms including access to select films once a week and limited access to tv. This and other "concessions" to detainees, rather than softening the image of the atrocious conditions at Guantanamo, highlight the absolute horror that is the system, and the dangerous paranoia that prevents detainees from doing just about anything. Read Andy Worthington on these new developments here.

Near East/ The "Muslim World"

No Empires admits to our own lack of analytical depth re: the situation obtaining in Pakistan since the military coup that put Gen. Pervez Musharraf in (increasingly shaky and dubious) power in 1999. It is, without a doubt, a country that has, for ideologically nefarious reasons, found itself swirling in the politics of George Bush's "War on Terror." But this month's seige at the "Red Mosque" in Islamabad, which had been brewing for months, certainly helps us place things in some perspective, at least as much as the previous crisis over the Pakistani judiciary did. We defer, for the moment, to Tariq Ali, who finds that the Pakistani electorate is hesitant to side with either of the groups--in Ali's words, "the Judges or the jihadis"--that have drawn the ire of Musharraf's authoritarian regime.

Richard Falk takes on the difficult, and often morally/politically dubious, task of drawing parallels between the approach of Israel and the "international community" toward Gaza, and the record of "collective atrocity" left in the wake of the Third Reich. There is, of course, nothing that galls Israel's supporters more than equivalences of this sort, which Falk is extremely careful in drawing out; what is preferred, of course, is an Israeli monopoly on the legacy and moral resonance of the Holocaust, which is cynically used to justify Israel's deplorable behavior. For more on what has been called "The Holocaust Industry", see the work of Norman Finkelstein.

The Independent has published a downright horrifying preview of interviews with American veterans of the War in Iraq, conducted by the Nation magazine. It's all here: utterly racist disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians; hackneyed "information-gathering" techniques; unencumbered bloodlust; and psychological destruction of both civilians and G.I.'s. Harrowing reading ahead, but is anyone all that surprised?

An IRIN report reveals that the Iraqi Ministry of Finanace is now offering life insurance, as well as bodyguards, to Iraq's university professors. Iraq's education system was once the envy of the Near East; a decade-plus of UN-sponsored economic sanctions--not to mention Saddam Hussein's well-documented paranoia and anti-intellectualism--irrevocably changed this situation. George Bush's war has brought the death of more than 200 professors, and the flight of thousands more.

In a charged piece for Al-Ahram Weekly, reprinted at the Electronic Intifada, Columbia's Joseph Massad rails against the subversion of Palestinian democracy that has been taking place over the past year-and-a-half.

Following her death on March 16, 2003, the parents of Rachel Corrie (subject of one of the best plays in recent memory, finally brought to the Minetta Lane theater last winter) filed a civil suit against Caterpillar, Inc. the American company that has a contract with Israel and provides it with the bulldozers that are regularly used to destroy Palestinian homes, a particularly long-standing and odious instance of illegal collective punishment. A judge dismissed the case in 2005, but Corrie's parents have moved to have the case reopened, citing the spuriousness of Caterpillar's original argument that they just couldn't possbily have known, and therefore have taken responsibility for, what Israel intended to do with their bulldozers.

The U.S.

The New York Times reports on the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which would see the installment of hundreds of cameras to monitor car (and, presumably, foot) traffic from the East River to the Hudson, to the tune of $90 million.

In a piece for Le Monde Diplomatique, Alex Cockburn writes on the sluggishness of the American anti-war movement, and points out that, for an anti-war demonstration to be "memorable and effective," it has to be "edgy, not comfortable"--something No Empires has grappled with recently, in the wake of our attending in June the first-ever protest specifically directed against the Israeli occupation.

Rudy Giuliani's campaign takes a hit in the South, as Rep. David Vitter becomes ensconced in his own hypocrisy. Sinner! No Empires isn't sure who we'd like to see drop out, or drop dead, first: Giuliani, or John McCain.

On elitism, and complacency

You can talk about the doltishness of our president all you want, but you have to acknowledge his power and influence, and that your snarky comments aren't going to change anything when no one is listening. Rather than ignore (with more than a tinge of self-righteousness and elitism) the idiocy and dogmatism of Washington at this completely formative moment in US history, try and be engaged. Rather than throw up your hands and drop out completely as soon as you recognize the emptiness of "official" Washington language, and realize that emptiness does not translate into impotence--parse the rhetoric and recognize its destructiveness. Decades from now, when historians are doing the difficult and vital work of figuring out just what the fuck went wrong with American foreign and domestic policies at the beginning of the 21st century, where do you think they will turn? Just because contributors to a website like Counterpunch, or intrepid journalists like Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk, seem to be telling the "right" story in their current work, doesn't mean we can just leave it at that.

Nota bene: despite the repeated use of the second-person pronoun in this post, this really isn't directed toward one person/group of people in particular. Rather, it bemoans a general trend that helps no one understand what is happening in the world around us.

Of course, it's not easy. If you're declaring yourself to be "above" paying attention to a Bush press conference, you're not better off turning to the major American print news outlets.

Coverage in the mainstream media of George Bush's press conference yesterday only serves to highlight, in our opinion, the absolute complicity of the American press in the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. In a typically muddled piece of "analysis" printed today, the New York Times's David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker--politely--lend their voices to the growing chorus of those who think that, in the end, George Bush must inhabit an ideologically perverse and analytically barren alternate universe. That this is, at this point, far too easy to suggest, seems not to matter. By sticking, albeit tepidly, to Bush's executive war-speak about what shape the American "mission" will take in a "post-surge" scenario, Sanger and Shanker not only serve to legitimize and reinforce Bush's corrupt Near East agenda; they also (purposely?) obscure their own paper's role in selling the public an unmitigated atrocity. On top of this, their piece ends with a move that could have come from Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama themselves: namely, to blame the occupied for the crimes of the occupiers. To say that the government of Nuri al-Maliki just simply won't have the wherewithal, or even the desire, to perform the difficult task of political reconciliation among Shia and Sunnis in Iraq, is to absolve the U.S. government of all wrongdoing in bringing unthinkable death and destruction through an illegal invasion, and a military occupation that is almost five years old.

Yesterday, the editors of the Washington Post accused, it seems, everyone but themselves of "wishful thinking" on Iraq, saying that if Bush seems over-optimistic about the likelihood of the situation in Iraq changing by mid-September, then Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton are, at best, guilty of the same as regarding the consequences of a troop "withdrawal." Borrowing a tactic, it would seem, from Bush's own speechwriters, they stoop even lower than the execrable Times and offer the trillionth repetition of a "stay the course" mantra.

This comes hot on the heels of a Times editorial on Saturday demanding an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Nevermind that whenever ANYONE in the White House, Congress (excepting Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul), or mainstream media talks about "withdrawal," they are being disingenuous, for what they really mean is "redeployment," and a contuining presence of US troops in the Near East and Gulf states. Anthony DiMaggio sees right through the Times' and other mainstream US news publications recent "anti-war" turn on their editorial pages, and asks why it's come about 50 months too late--though this hypocritical about-face did prompt the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal to condemn the Times' "appeasement." The best we can say about these two latter publications is that, hey, at least they're consistent in their support of unbridled aggression to protect U.S. "interests."